1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to computer systems, and in particular hardware semaphore devices within computer systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Hardware semaphores are employed within computer systems to assist in determining the availability of computer resources such as a memory chip, hard disk drive, or the like, which can only be controlled and accessed by a single requesting device at a time. The hardware semaphore provides a flag or token indicating whether the resource is available such that the requesting device need not attempt to access a resource which is already controlled by another device and is unavailable.